A Comparison Review of Automated Construction Scheduling Methods

Abstract: Scheduling is considered the major part of the planning phase in construction project life cycle. Traditional manual scheduling methods, especially in large-scale projects with huge amount of activities and various construction methods and resource types still remain as the time-consuming, error-prone and complex process. Therefore, diverse construction framework and templates have been developed to automatically generate the construction schedules, not only to increase the accuracy and speed of scheduling but also to decrease the substantial manual efforts in construction project planning, significantly. This article reviews the research on automated construction scheduling and classifies them into three main categories including the Artificial intelligence (AI)-based scheduling, simulation-based scheduling and integrated BIM-based scheduling. The strengths and weaknesses of some specific methods are identified and discussed. Finally, advantages of Integrated BIM-based scheduling in comparison with other methods have been demonstrated, and a new direction for further research indicated.